"Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal to
give. Individual to this plane. We didn't tell it to you. You couldn't
duplicate it."
Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen
through another--that was identification. It was not a type of signaling
an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.
"Also," said the co-pilot, "we have a television camera in the
instrument board yonder. We've turned it on now. The interior of the
cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony
colonel and the atom bomb that didn't 'explode.'"
Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting gradually
downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere
between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit.
The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate
sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air,
however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three
hundred feet per minute is about right.
The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too
small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After
long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took
over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There
was a plaintive, mechanical _beep-beep_ and he changed course.
"You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the co-pilot. He added
vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missed
that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing
happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"
Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly
realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were
flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these
far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and
depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....
The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained
his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on
the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry
stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a
sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.
There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range
and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe
realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made
for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was
colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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